It’s Not All About You – Writing Great Content For Your Site

As you know, there’s high demand from your customers for you to write some great content for your site.

But what does great content look like? And how can you create great content for your own site – no matter what industry you’re in?

How the S.T.A.Y. Formula Helps You Create Better Content

As human beings we love to talk about ourselves.

We ask “What do you do?” in the hopes that someone will return the favor. We call into radio talk shows to talk about what we think. We post on Facebook every chance we get.

[clickandtweet handle=”” hashtag=”” related=”” layout=”” position=””]Talking about ourselves is typically not that difficult – but it’s NOT the best way to create content for your website.[/clickandtweet]

How do you know if you’re failing to provide great content?

Here’s the deal…

When you create content – S.T.A.Y.

… Stop

… Talking

… About

… Yourself

I tell my clients that when you’re putting together your content calendar, 80% of your content should focus on solving your customers’ pain points and 20% should be focused on selling. 

When I evaluate websites for conversion the first thing I notice is most websites are all about “We are this” and “We do that”.

Sure, that might sound fine, you need to tell your visitors what you do, right?

But when you’re following inbound marketing strategies and techniques you have to flip that conversation completely around.

Don’t get all We-We

It’s called going from “we-we” to “you-you”. First coined by Bryan Eisenberg as part of Persuasion Architecture, calculating your “WeWe Score” helps you understand whether your content is truly focused on your customer, or focused on you.

The original “WeWe Calculator” is no longer around, but I found a similar tool here at CustomerFocusCalculator.com that’s easy to use and gives you a quick analysis of how well you’re using customer focused content.

Why the You-You Will Get You More Customers

a) It gets the visitor to start saying “Yes” right away.

“Yes, I’m worried about receiving my widgets on time.”

“Yes, I’m looking for a US-based, modern manufacturing facility”.

And any great salesperson will tell you, when you get a customer to start saying “yes”, it’s more difficult for them to start saying “no”.

b) The visitor immediately creates a relationship with you because “you understand what they’re worried about”, and building relationships is what inbound marketing is all about.

c) People don’t really care about “you” – they care about themselves – what are you going to do for me?

They don’t care that you’ve been proud to have a company since 1995 – they care that you are going to get them what they need, on time.

Look To Your Buyer Personas Before You Start

When you’re writing persuasive content it’s always important to consult your Buyer Personas. You need to understand your readers well and then craft the content to speak to them – ease their fears, fulfill their needs and lead them to understand that your company has what they are looking for.

Your Buyer Personas will help you see them as real people, not statistics, and it’s always easier to speak to real people than it is to speak to numbers.

First step today, plug your website URL into the CustomerFocusCalculator.com.

How focused is your content?

Are you talking about yourself or are you starting a conversation with your customers?

Start thinking about how you can change your content to be more conversational and customer-centric and you will immediately see the benefits of increase engagement, sales growth, and lower acquisition costs due to higher referral rates.